nullstream weblog - January 2005

Terragen

Photoblog

January 29, 2005 10:49 PM PST

Ok, time for a new photoblog post. Hate to see the Thailand post off the front page, but we are still blessed from the banner.

Terragen is a freeware 3D landscape generation and rendering application for Windows. It was designed to render actual USGS and planetary data. After reading about the data from the probe landing on Titan being rendered by Terragen, I decided to check it out. I'm an old fan of Kai's Power Tools and Bryce, which was an exceptional landscape based rendering tool.

The interface to Terragen is pretty rough, but it sure can generate beautiful pictures. In many ways Bryce back in 1996 was more advanced in terms of 3D procedural textures and solid modeling tools, but Terragen seems more scientific for some reason. The cloud and water modeling is excellent as are the shadows. All in all, Terragen is a great tool for rendering landscapes, and doesnt (yet) try to be as artsy as Bryce. Don't expect to throw together scenes like these your first time out!

Continue reading "Terragen"...

Comments (0)

Sun Twitches

News

January 26, 2005 10:34 PM PST

Sun has announced the launch of OpenSolaris. This is their answer to Linux, and will be released under a 'CDDL' license that is much friendlier than the GPL. They still plan to brand and sell the proprietary version of Solaris (building on the open source developement). They don't have the code up on the site yet, (just a single module), but it is planned for the end of this month. Additionally they have opened some 1,670 patents to open-source developers. I’m getting a feeling of deja vu here. Feels like netscape all over again. You can read more about this here.

Comments (2)

Google Video Beta

January 25, 2005 11:26 AM PST

I just checked out the new Google Video Beta. They are currently scanning and archiving the closed captioning of current shows along with some snapshots. They also link to 'more' information about the show including future air times. Hmm, I'm not sure where they are going with this, but I can think of where I want them to go.

Comments (0)

More Cringley Mac Mini Predictions

January 21, 2005 01:37 PM PST

Paul pointed us to Cringley's latest mac mini predictions.

Comments (18)

Paul, January 21, 2005 02:03 PM:

I'd be happy to rent movies on demand via a Mac Mini. This is what I've been on about with the silliness around Netflix physically mailing digital content.

John, January 21, 2005 02:04 PM:

My two cents:
I think the proposition that online downloaded HD movies could take off is possible. But I also agree with J that this Mac machine is missing the MAIN component to do this, optical digital output. But this is practically the only obstacle to being a media player component. With this functionality is could be the online equivalent of a DVD player and a CD player - but not a TIVO box. Since TIVO is already seeing the writing on the wall as it starts getting competition from the cable companies, it doesn't really make sense for Apple to try and enter that market now. It would be an interesting approach, however, not to even try and compete with a Media Center or TIVO solution however. An online movie service modeled like ITunes would be just the ticket.

One thing that is very interesting to consider... The movie industry is very scared of DIVX, bit-torrent and one piracy in general. They are not hit has hard as the music industry yet, but they are beginning to respond in the same way. They, however, are on the edge of a new generation of a new era – HD. This gives them the ability to obsolete the 'cracked' DVD format by offering something better. The music industry doesn't really have the same ability. The Movie giants are currently engaged in a format war, but I suspect there is another internal conflict brewing – copy protection / control in general. I actually think that the idea of delivering movies directly to the consumer and bypassing the disc altogether would appeal to them. They could put stronger DRM on it for one, and tie it to users to avoid 'sharing'. They could also bypass the distribution channel. At a minimum they could bypass the format war, or at least get a head start on it.

Now for the reality… and I think Cringley missed this. Users just don't have the bandwidth to make this practical today or in even in the next few years. I've downloaded movies from Movielink etc, and you really need significant bandwidth to make this work. And these movies are sub-DVD quality; typically only around 500Mb. HD movies on the other hand are going to be Gigabytes! This is whole reason for the new format – they won't fit on the 8G DVDs we currently have! How long would a user really be willing to wait to watch the movie they just bought? Also I personally doubt that the mini is the box to be targeted at this, although it is close (audio, hard drive size mostly). Also if someone told me they found a secret IR transceiver on the front for a remote control I might re-consider.

Paul, January 21, 2005 07:52 PM:

I think that the Mac Mini isn't there yet for doing movie downloads. It's a prototype, with enough disk space for your average music lover, but not enough for storing movies.

But, I expect the feature set to iterate quickly on this thing as people buy it. I think it will be an organic transition from mini-desktop to media center. This makes more sense than the current Microsoft approach to Windows Media Center which is to build this super fancy hub that no one except hard core people have a use for. "You can display pictures on your TV! And play MP3s!" Meh. My PC does those things better than my TV.

I think the 3rd party add-on market is going to have a field day with the Mac Mini. The uses for this thing will be market and user driven. Podcasting wasn't designed by Apple, bloggers got into it.

We'll see.

Paul, January 21, 2005 07:54 PM:

If they did decide to do movie downloads, I imaging that (as Cringely mentioned), the first set of movies available will be all the Pixar films. Now that would be cool, and the demand would be insane.

Paul, January 21, 2005 10:31 PM:

I have to get to bed early tonight, so that I can get to the Apple store before it opens (9am, one hour earlier than usual) and line up for the kool-aid!

George, January 21, 2005 10:41 PM:

I don't think Apple will do a media center box, at least not one that resembles today's media center pc. I expect Apple's solution will include a digital hub (i.e., the pc) for storage and general purpose computing. But it won't be in your living room. Content will be streamed to your TV from the local digtal media storage or directly from iFlix. Yes, streaming to media extenders is exactly what Microsoft is selling today, but Apple will have a solution that blows away the current concept. Like a wireless wall wart with video and audio out. Think Airport Express (http://www.apple.com/airportexpress/) for video.

One comment to John, don't look for IR on an Apple system. Think bluetooth or wifi. IR is so last millenium.

Paul, January 22, 2005 12:08 AM:

Yeah, IR is the new beige.

John, January 22, 2005 03:23 AM:

You guys are so funny, I think apple would do a wired remote (with stylish white wires though) before they would do a bluetooth or wifi remote. At any rate a lot of this theory does not make sense. I guess we will see. I suspect we will at least know how Sony is tied into this by the time the next drop of OS X rolls out. To be honest I'm actually more surprised that Microsoft doesn't have a big imovie style store in the works. Not that I would know. But MS at least already has all the pieces in place; media center PC, Xbox Extender, and a portable media player. All that is missing is a big movie on demand store to keep it all fed. In this regard Apple would be way behind.

J, January 22, 2005 01:48 PM:

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." The network isn't going to be there for a while for DVD quality movie downloads. It takes about 24 hours completely hammering your connection for a popular 700mb file to come down over bittorrent. DVD and HD DVD at their larger size will take much longer, and anything but new releases will not take advantage of the "torrent" nature of why bittorrent scales. Bandwidth costs will be much more than bulk-letter rate for companies to send out DVDs. I actually think delivery through the mail was and is a great idea for movies. BTW, nothing has come of the Netflix and TiVo partnership, and they're best positioned to implement this.

On demand and mail could be combined, however. You could order DVDs that were actually encrypted and burned on the fly to a DVD and mailed to you to keep for $5 or whatever. This would be a feasible way for movie companies to DRM every DVD release, similar to how iTunes are locked to a user. Disc format is much better than having to spin up a terabyte of storage for the HD-DVDs I've downloaded. This also solves the small storage problem of the mac mini.

As for mac mini - it's a stepping stone. I don't think it was designed for any one thing at this point. The hot device this year is networked media players, so this sort of plays in that space. I agree that it's more likely apple will let peripheral makers add on to this thing, and then take the best ideas for an upgrade next year. I could also see an add-on box from Apple (or Sony) that adds optical out, remote control, HD and other media features. Once you have one of these things, and they come out with a $400 add on for media capabilities, they'll be back to their old profit margins again. They'll either have people upgrading to media version or upgrading to a G5 desktop.

John, January 22, 2005 02:06 PM:

In regard to torrent and bandwidth. I don't see the torrent model working for a commercial 'on-demand' service. It seems the right distributed model, but it depends on machines etc outside of the companies control. Also like you noted it is still too slow. Mostly I think due to the limited upstream bandwidth of most users. I think the answer for commercial is just brute force, tons of servers and tons of bandwidth.
I have downloaded a couple of movies from Movielink, and they seem to be able to keep up with my 3mb dl speed. So the comcast speed increase will help out here. MovieLink is now offering what they call (EQ) movies. These are twice as big as their normal movies, and are encoded VBR with 1.3mb average. These movies are far from HD though. They are still less than DVD quality and I've seen many a Divx that looked better. But it is a good start. There are a few other services doing this as well.
One this I agree with Cringley on is that downloading a movie needs to be at least as fast as getting in the car and driving to the rental store in order to be successful.

Hap, January 25, 2005 11:33 PM:

This may well be Apples plan but the bandwidth does not exist (at least for for the average consumer). I'm not sure I would use it either way. As for remote control I would go with bluetooth. You don't want your neigbor changing the channel after all. I think the Imac Mini was designed with a few uses in mind. A cheap second commputer for J (and others I supose) and as a component for... this has all the ports it needs to hook up a tv and radio receiver. The DVI connector will work great with the new TV's. Thats probably where I would put it if I got one.

Paul, January 28, 2005 12:47 AM:

New week, new article:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050127.html

John, January 28, 2005 03:04 AM:

He just won’t let this go. He has a counter for every flaw in his original theory. Now he is saying, hey maybe the firewire port will be the digital audio out, and hey just maybe this thing can do 720p decoding just like it’s big brother the G5. Oh and with good enough DRM you will just burn your downloaded movies to DVD to keep from filling up the ‘mini’ hard drive. And the final stretch; maybe the reason Comcast is increasing its bandwidth is so Apple can stream movies to the mini faster. That is a lot of ‘maybes’. Yes all this is plausible, but it seems just a little far fetched to me. There are some interesting tidbits to gather from all this Mac Mini hype and speculation however: 1. Small form factor computers can be cool. People are already inventing all kinds of things to do with them. With any luck the PC will wake up and bring some similar products to market soon (imitation is fine with me). I know many manufacturers have already tried this but maybe Apple will make the idea ‘popular.’ 2. The fact that so many people are coming to the same conclusions on how you could use a product ‘like’ the mini (but not exactly the min) to sell, distribute, and play movies is an indication on some level of what consumers really ‘want’. The fact that so many have been able to articulate a business model that actually seems possible is impressive. I doubt that this is Apples true secret plan, but they would be dumb not to wake up and start paying attention to this idea. If they don’t someone else will.

Paul, January 28, 2005 11:32 AM:

I really like the idea of a mini computer. The Mac mini is smaller than it looks in pictures, when you see it in person it is shockingly small.

I hope this starts a trend of small PCs and Macs. While I'd love a G5, I'm not going to buy a tower, and I really don't need expansion. A Mini-G5 would be perfect for me.

This is why I love consoles: small, and they just work. When you build a computer out of components like I do, there are no end of problems and no one to help fix them. It would be cool if Alienware made a mini-gamer machine. Doesn't need to be the most bleeding of edges, but good enough to play D3 / HL2, and be assembled / tested so that I don't have to worry about driver problems, heat, etc.

I will be very happy when wires and bulky PCs are gone from my life.

John, January 28, 2005 02:10 PM:

We've been talking about this for some time now. I also would like a small form factor machine. Without a new 'killer' app most people just don't need the CPU power they have today. I'm not suggesting that computers don't continue to get faster mind you. It's just that today I only stretch my machine with two tasks; 1. Video encoding (Divx or DVD authoring), and 2. High end gaming. Most people don't do video encoding. And as you mentioned console gaming is just so 'hot' right now. Lets face it the only PC game I put any time into last year was Half-life 2. All other gaming was done on Xbox Live.
It's also not fair to think they if you get Small form factor you don't get expansion. With firewire and USB 2.0, you can add nearly anything you want to the system without opening the box (except graphics and RAM). You pay in wires however.
Speaking of wires, A nice SFF machine with Bluetooth and WIFI G starts to come close to eliminating the wires. All you need to connect is power and the monitor.

Paul, January 28, 2005 03:39 PM:

I'd move gaming completely to the console, but RPG style games like neverwinter nights and warcraft just don't work very well there. And of course, the limitations on screen resolution are a little annoying.

J, January 29, 2005 10:43 PM:

The funny thing is that gaming drives so much now (projector, 12ms lcd, geforce6800gt), but I never play games! I only am on Xbox because someone was kind enough to send me one, and we have an organized net night! The mac mini will hopefully product a PC based clone, based on the nano-itx form factor.

Regardless of what the mini is for... the convergence device is already happening. This year the big consumer gadget for TV is the wireless media player that plays all manner of music and movies on your television via wifi, like the D-Link DSM-320. These are already at $150 and will only drop from there. In many ways, consumer electronic companies are still in the best position to throw a tuner and HDD in one of these boxes.

John, January 30, 2005 12:42 AM:

The idea of building small form factor home servers has an appeal for some as well. Furrygoat built one a while back with an Asus Pundit as the base. You can build this today for around 316.00. You could build something cheaper if you don't mind using the 1Ghz Via processor.

Comment Spam

Nullstream Site

January 19, 2005 05:24 AM PST

Google, Yahoo, MSN, MovableType and others have agreed to not boost search rankings to sites with links marked with the rel="nofollow" attribute set. While this doesn't physically prevent comments on blogs from being created with links back to sites, it does prevent them from doing any good on search rankings. I'm very impressed to see these major search providers working together, as well as the major blogging software packages all jumping on this standard. An elegant solution that everyone can get on board with.

I've updated the site to mark all links within comments with this attribute automatically, so only links within the main posts will do anything to boost search rankings of sites. I believe this also closes the door to trackback links boosting the value of various blogs.

Comments (7)

John, January 19, 2005 10:22 AM:

Is there any value to trackback at all now?

J, January 19, 2005 11:36 AM:

Yes, it still allows people to see related stories that other blogs post, so you can hop from blog to blog on a topic. It helps human referrals, just not google rankings!

J, March 16, 2005 08:48 AM:

Interesting new comment spam on the site now. completely random name, email, ip address, url and contents. The URLs actually start with nullstream, but end in a random value and .com. So they're likely a phishing scam. Firefox correctly interprets these links as "file not found" on nullstream, but IE may actually direct to a site.

Not sure why one would bother with random hex characters as the link text (who's clicking on that?). We mark links with nofollow, so it won't affect rankings in the search engines either. Dummies.

We have a mechanism to prevent even these random links (although they foil mt-blacklist pretty well). I'll leave the links up for a day or two in the comments if you want to do some investigation.

J, March 19, 2005 04:01 PM:

I've updated the site to disallow automated spambots. That plus nofollow on links and mt-blacklist should help with nearly all spam.

Every time I write something in perl, I am reminded how nasty and error-prone that language is. It's ridiculous how many web sites back ends are written in perl given the massive risk of overflows and exploits unless the developer is extremely proficient. I would guess that for any beginner to medium level programmer, Java would be the best back end for web software, just because mistakes don't typically have as big an impact.

Paul, March 19, 2005 06:56 PM:

Python

Paul Graham, March 19, 2005 06:57 PM:

Lisp

Paul, March 19, 2005 09:57 PM:

((((((((((((((((+ smart ass))))))))))))))))

Comcast Speed Boost?

Rumors

January 17, 2005 01:17 AM PST

Ars-Technica is reporting that there may be another speed boost coming from Comcast in the first quarter. If they are correct, users will be boosted from 3mb / 256kb to 4mb / 384kb. Like last time this will be with no price increase - and all it took was a power cycle on the cable modem. According to the article premium service users ($10 more than normal price) will be boosted to 6Mb / 768kb!!! Hey I didn't know they had reduced the price of the premium service to just $10 more. Last time I checked it was almost $100.00 a month. I hope this is true, there is no such thing as too much bandwidth.

Comments (3)

Hacker Tales

Articles

January 12, 2005 10:27 PM PST

Saw this article on SecurityFocus. Very interesting/fun reading:
Hacker Penetrates T-Mobile Systems. The article linked from this one about the guy selling Microsoft source code for $20 is pretty interesting too. I wonder how long it would have taken them to find out about the leak if the guy hadn't tried to sell the info? I'm sure there are a lot smarter people with this kind of access that don't.

Lessons to learn: If you hack a computer system, don't try to sell the information. If you have to brag about it, use a new, anonymous account each time, and never, ever, agree to meet up with people through their "proxy server" to prove it. And if you sell the source code to one guy and he "loses it"... Don't do it again. LOL. Just enjoy Paris Hilton's phonecam pics.

Comments (1)

iMac LC (OK, Mac mini)

Cool Tech

January 11, 2005 11:30 AM PST

Ok, at our first glance it has beat our negativity and lives up to expectations. Very, very interesting product from Apple.

Highlights: $499, Available Jan. 22nd Expandable memory DVI Silent PC Anodized Aluminum Case (Not Plastic!) Quicktime MPEG-4 Standard support No single button mouse

Remember, there are very popular firewire TV tuner/capture solutions for the Mac, so this makes a DVR type device possible.

I like how they don't even try to pretend they're the only game in town - "just set us on top of your PC and port your software." Very cool attitude.

Perfect for Programmers
Set a space-saving Mac mini atop your workstation PC and add a KVM switch to share keyboard, monitor and mouse. Mac OS X includes free developer tools for Mac, UNIX and Java. Test out a Mac version of your latest creation, instantly. Pretty soon you’ll be using the Mac full-time, with that PC relegated to the testbed.

Comments (33)

Paul, January 11, 2005 01:50 PM:

I'll getting (at least 2) Mac minis, plus the GarageBand update has many great recording features. For $79, I'll be getting iLife 05 and the new JamPack. iWork is also $79, so it's a "might as well" purchase. A native word processor is nice, and I certainly don't need excel or exchange compatibility.

I can't believe they did this... now all we need is a PocketPC / SmartPhone competitor and I'll be all Mac'd up.

J, January 11, 2005 02:52 PM:

I think iLife comes with these, so you don't need to buy it seperately. They're bundled with AppleWorks for some reason though, instead of iWork... Not sure why. George and my big issue is whether it will come with a free/cheap upgrade to Tiger later in the year. I can see them not wanting to delay this for the new OS, but I'd hate to have to pay 20% the cost of the computer to upgrade the OS in a few months.

Paul, January 11, 2005 03:07 PM:

20% == $100, and the features are pretty sweet: 64 bit OS, built in search, Xcode, Dashboard widgets, and more. I certainly don't have a problem paying for that.

iLife includes the GarageBand update, and is $79.
iWork is $79.
GarageBand JamPacks are $99.

All of them are very much worth it (IMHO).

J, January 11, 2005 03:30 PM:

I'm just saying I should get a discount now for the OS upgrade, since it will come free with machines that people buy down the line. This is still a toy for me, so another $100 is a lot. I don't pay that much for XP! I'm already peeved about still paying that for .mac membership - OS updates should just be included with that! Also, I'm not sure iWork is worth it for you since you have Office:mac, but it might be a fun toy. I'd like to hope Keynote is better than PowerPoint.

The G4 isn't 64 bit though, right? So I'd be interested to see how it runs. Maybe some of the code is optimized for the 64 bit altivec unit (that's not like a funnel).

I'm glad they have a dedicated graphics chip with 32 MB. Not great for 3D, but will definitely improve the performance of the graphics-heavy OS features. Based on Tom's Hardware reviews, the Radeon 9200 is about the same performance as a GeForce4 440 MX. So this should be great for 2D and be fine for most of the 2-3 year old 3D mac games (not trying to make fun of them here). At this low a cost, I'm actually surprised they did dedicated graphics ram and a slim format combo drive.

I was also reading that external USB bluetooth adaptors work, not sure about USB Wi-Fi cards.

I will have to wait until I read some reviews on these and get some word on Tiger updates. The main thing I'd like to see is whether standard Divx/Xvid files play in the latest quicktime. Actually, Paul - you can test that out, right?

So is it worth the extra $100 for the bigger HDD and 170mhz? Or do you just overclock that bad boy for the 170mhz (doubt there's any difference in the processor or mobo) and apply the $100 towards a 40GB iPod? Or do you just realize that "cheap bastard" and Apple don't go together? ;) Have to wait for the performance reviews I guess.

J, January 11, 2005 03:40 PM:

Apparently the iWork "Pages" application imports and exports to Word format (limited I'm sure) and has built in PDF writing. Nice...

Paul, January 11, 2005 03:44 PM:

I'm going to get the 80 GB drive and the 512 MB RAM option for both.

You don't pay $100 for XP because you get it from the Microsoft Store! No offense to MS people, but OS X is nicer than XP. This is obvious since OS X is updated yearly, and Windows XP came out 4 years ago, even with SP2 (which breaks stuff). It'll take almost 2 more years before MS releases Longhorn and in that time there will be something like 2 significant OS X updates. I'm sure that Longhorn will rock, and I'll get it the day it comes out, but for now, OS X is teh l337.

If mini-Mac a toy, then you shouldn't be upgrading stuff on it. Treat it like an xbox... you just plug stuff into it without paying extra cash. I think of this machine as the "starter car" of Macs... spend a little cash to get a taste of OS X, and if you like it you can go to a more expensive and more capable machine. None of us is the target market for this.. these machines are for my mom and sister. I want to get an iPod for my mom (she wants the U2 one), but since she's running my old 450 MHz Win2k machine, I shudder to think how painful it will be getting the iPod detected. Oh yeah, and that machine doesn't have Firewire or USB 2 which the mini-Mac has.

The G4 isn't 64 bit, you're right but the other features in Tiger look good to me.

J, January 11, 2005 04:07 PM:

True, MS store (and friends) are nice. But XP's about the same price when you buy it with hardware or as a 2K upgrade, but I haven't paid for XP upgrades for 4 years! With Mac, I'm paying $129 a year, plus $100 for .mac! (Well, actually I'm not upgrading my mac at all, since they stopped supporting the beige G3 in 10.1) The Mac is definitely more expensive for OS purchases - and maybe you do get more eye candy with Mac, but XP is still a great, fast and stable OS that supports a massive range of hardware. I'm not so sure the rapid updates to an OS are good things, unless the OS isn't mature. That said - I agree that XP should just come out with UI and widget updates. Longhorn should simply be the updated UI with 64 bit support. That's it. Well maybe an updated browser too...

If you go to the OS X tab on apple's home page, the first thing they hype is Tiger. A lot of people will feel they're getting something that's already obsolete if there's no upgrade path.

Anyway, this looks interesting for me as a media player machine and a development box and as a supportable machine for the in-laws. You're exactly right about this being a great pair with the U2 iPod.

The apple education store has them for $479 and $579 respectively, free shipping. You're not getting a Dell, dude!

J, January 11, 2005 04:16 PM:

The upgrades are interesting. The lower end model you can boost to 80GB for another $50. 512MB ram is O.K at $75, but the 1GB ram is insane! It's nowhere near that expensive! I guess 512 is the sweet spot. I guess it doesn't have two memory slots?

George, January 11, 2005 06:04 PM:

The apple site indicates that the user can't add their own airport card later. ditto for memory. I think this is the first mac in a long time that has no Apple sanctioned end user hardware updates.

One configuration dilemma is the optional optical drive. I don't really need a dvd burner but aftermarket slot loading burners are much more than $100 so I'd probably want to spring for the burner. But, the current superdrive isn't dual layer. I may have to wait for the Rev B version to get dual layer bunrne and tiger.

George, January 11, 2005 06:34 PM:

Just a question for anyone that is into creating multimedia on a Window box. Is anyone spending money on DVD creator software or music studio software for the PC?

I wonder if the $649 (512Mb + superdrive upgrade) price point is low enough to encourage people who are creating DVDs from home movies or are doing music recording to experiment with a mac? My guess is no, unless someone is just getting started and doesn't have a pc that is well equiped (firewire capture, dvd burner, decent memory size, windows xp).

John, January 11, 2005 06:36 PM:

This would be a really nice form factor for a Media Center PC. It looks cool enough you wouldn't even try to hide it, but set it on top of your TV. I know they said they would never do it, but they are soooo close now. This thing would need the following items built in:
New media center style UI.
Dolby Digital Out
Bigger HD
Remote Control
Tuner
TV Output

You can do most of these things today, but with external components - some 3rd party.

While they are at it, they should create some universal Ipod dock and build it in to the top of the chassis - no wires needed. How cool would that be? I'm surprised they haven't done this already.

J, January 11, 2005 07:08 PM:

I wouldn't use this to burn CDs or DVDs so it's not a big deal to me. You can always get an external DL burner I guess. I got an internal dual layer for around $60, so adding a case to that isn't that much more. If I had a firewire video camera I might be more interested in DVD authoring using iDVD (which doesn't come with the bundle). Then again, I'd more likely use a badass AMD64 and 10K RPM drive if I was doing authoring.

I'm not troubled with the upgradability. 512 MB is a must (and 75 clams is a bit much), but the rest is fine. We'll see once they're released how upgradable the ram is. I don't see why you can't do Wifi or bluetooth through USB2, although I don't care about either because I'm "wired".

It might sound mean, but this mac is exactly where I see the target level of Mac being. It's lost most of the high end markets to wintel. This mac does exactly the basics that I'd be interested in having it run. I have all the other stuff covered. For any power user stuff, you'd be better off going wintel. (Although for laptops (non-upgradable, limited gaming, limited cpu, all about form factor), apple is still a great choice).

J, January 11, 2005 07:14 PM:

Yeah, you can definitely do mac media center today with external components. I don't know that you HAVE to have a bigger HDD - TiVo still ships with 40GB base so you could get away with the 80GB drive in two partitions, but it's not ideal.

These guys have a tuner that's about the same size as the mini mac: elgato. It looks pretty good, solving the tuner and remote problem, but still you have the SPDIF problem. Although shows you record won't have this. That AMD64 Shuttle box has SPDIF in and out!

If this takes off, I could see sage or someone else coming out with a breakout box that had all this stuff in it - tuner, IR, spdif, s-video/component in and out - and maybe even a hard drive. The iPod ecosystem is big, and I can see the Mac mini ecosystem being equivalent.

I think once Tiger comes out with it's Dashboard components, we'll see people creating sweet television format UIs for iTunes, QuickTime, etc. These components have an open dev kit and are all XML and Javascript (not sure how closely they are related to Firefox XUL). The OS comes with these dashboard player interfaces, so it would just take some tweaks to make them sized right and interact with an IR controller.

Apple doesn't want to give up control of the hardware or the OS (or the basic applications), but by having an open, unix core system and a dynamic ecosystem of add-on hardware they could bring a lot of other smart companies into the fold and we may see some cool hybrid products.

J, January 11, 2005 07:20 PM:

The iPod already has a dock - if the mac unit were in your TV cabinet, you'd want the doc wire to run up the back and have the doc sit on the top of the cabinet anyway - not sure you'd want it integrated.

I'd like to see a device that's the exact same size and shape as mac mini - that contains a standard IDE/SATA HDD, Tuner, IR with remote and high def A/V inputs and outputs. They could sell this for 300-350 with the proper dashboard plugins for mac and spank windows media center.

Paul, January 11, 2005 08:01 PM:

Anyone want to start a pool to see if Apple doubles or triples its current market share by 1 July 2005 because of the mini-Mac?

J, January 11, 2005 08:19 PM:

Well the market share probably includes really old macs. Maybe they'll set a sales record for number of macs, or even better - gross profit from macs.

The one thing that could sink them is if the machine isn't fast enough to run all the apps easily. I know the iMac G5 was panned for not having enough ram to really run in the base model. Have you guys worked on a 1.2 GHZ G4? Is it going to be OK?

John, January 11, 2005 09:01 PM:

Responding to multiple comments...

I don't think you want to author DVDs with this. Even on a moderately fast PC transcoding can take a long time, and a lot of disk space.

I don't think an add-on to get to media center is the way to go. You still need a nice 'remote control' UI etc. I think that Apple is close enough to it now, they should just take the next step and build these extra features in. It is a logical companion to the Ipod etc. Plus they can do a nice TV UI for the Apple music store. You could buy Tunes without leaving your couch.

I imagine they could double their sales with this, but I'm more interested in what kind of profit they will make. I doubt it is much because they don't have PC style volume. It will be interesting to see what the stock does on the next quarterly report.

I can see this winning back Apple defectors (hmm, J). Plus for this price gadget geeks will buy first and figure out what to do with it later. This thing costs less than my new PocketPC did.

It seems to me that the size of hard drive you get is determined by the size of Ipod you have. If you have a 40G Ipod then you need the larger drive, else you can't hold all your tunes + the OS etc.

John, January 11, 2005 09:23 PM:

Interesting that you don't see the large power brick in the publicity photos. Not that its a big deal, but that brick is pretty massive, at least when compared to the mini itself.

Hap, January 12, 2005 09:02 AM:

As for the OS 10.4 hasn't really excited me yet. but this machine sure does (like most apple hardware). I have talked about Digital Convergence for years. The Toaster mac (cube) came close but suffered from a few fatal flaws and it looks like Apple has learned it's lesson.

First it's (relativly) Inexpensive. nuff said

Second it has a front loaded drive. this means you can put it in your entertianment center cabinet and still be able to use it.

Third it's tiny and looks good. who wants to put a tower by there TV.

Fourth it has the options avalable to make it truely usefull in this reguard. Radioshark, Eye TV etc.

Fifth simple to use and maintain. A win If they can give me uptime like my Tivo (the first digital convergence device... though they won't say it).

Finaly it has the software it needs to work. Ilife etc.

Sixth Still a computer. Unlike my Tivo or Xbox this machine admits it's a computer so I can use it like one.

I can see this thing selling well. Because of the things I said and more. If J is thinking about it it must be cool because he hasn't seriously considered a Mac in years. Got that KVM switch yet?

Things we stil need to see to be sure.

one how loud is it? I can't have a 747 in my living room.

Two it doesn't take much to make graphics look good on a TV But it must integrate well with my TV and home stereo system. Will my Radio Shark sound good over the Stereo Speakers for example. If they can do this they have a winner.

Three real world performance. I will be watching the reaction of the early adopters very closely.

Fourth ??? there are many small issues that when taken together are critical and it will be interesting to see howthey play out.

I can see these all over the house with a high end game station er I mean server managing them. My kids don't need super machines but it would be nice to administer them from a central location. This may not be cheap but it's inexpensive and modular enough that I can peacemeal it together.

Well my planes about to board and I'm getting long winded.

Your thoughts?

J, January 12, 2005 02:22 PM:

To introduce Hap - he's a friend of mine from the good old days. Owns a Mac. We talked about a small set-top mac EXACTLY like this back in 1997/1998. I still remember discussing how quicktime should be used to record/distribute content to it. I'm kind of peeved at myself for still being so happy about Mac mini 7 years later, but maybe now the market is ready.

Paul, January 12, 2005 03:20 PM:

AAPL stock is up $7.50 (~ 10%) after the earning anouncement today: the highest quarterly revenue and net income in Apple's history, apparently (and soon to get better I'd guess with mini-Mac).

Apple also gained market share last quarter (Mac sales grew by 26%, compared to the overall market growth of 10%)...

The story is here.

George, January 12, 2005 06:56 PM:

Apple's on a tear at the same time Google is creating a new generation of dot.com millionaires. Coincidence? I bet Larry and Sergy are on Steve's Christmas card list.

J, January 12, 2005 07:11 PM:

My friend Hap who posted earlier, noticed a long time ago that Apple nearly always has a huge stock jump after macworld SF. Almost a guaranteed way to make money. But who'd want to do that?

I just have to remind you that Apple being on a tear this year means they came out with a flash based mp3 player with no screen and a re-packaged G4 Cube. WTF is the rest of the market doing?

Apple and Google will fight over desktop search though. No biggie, but it's not all fun and games. My opinion is that this IS the stuff that should be built in, at an API level to the OS. It's just like how WinZIP was a seperate program for so many years, it was ridiculous.

Paul, January 12, 2005 09:35 PM:

The strangest thing about desktop search is the complete lack of it up until recently. It's one of the things that should be shipped with the OS with an API so that every app that gets installed just registers with the indexer so that any file format can be indexed.

The funniest thing is how Scoble on Channel9 is going on about the MSN desktop search team "cranking out code in 6 months". Good one! The hard drive indexing code has been shipping on Windows since Win2k! All they did was to turn it on, plugin to its interfaces and write a few toolbars... hardly 6 months of work.

J, January 12, 2005 10:19 PM:

Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous. BeOS had a "database filesystem", and you could search any file on the hard drive, including emails, contacts and notes! It was sweet. I actually lost a file on my computer the other day (created several months earlier) and the only way I could find where it was stored was by going to the "recent documents" menu in the application that created it.

I don't think we need WinFS for it, but I still want folders to just represent arbitrary, pre-indexed searches. So I can bring up every document, email and chat log where "nullstream" is mentioned, sort by date, etc. When I create the folder, the scan could be slower, but once it's there, it should be quick.

J, January 13, 2005 12:04 AM:

John, great point about synching the 40GB iPod. I think there's an option to not store the music on your PC (since the iPod is a firewire HDD), but I'm not sure how it all works. Maybe Paul has an answer?

J, January 19, 2005 05:52 AM:

Looks like the ram and laptop HDD are user-upgradable. Of course, you're throwing away the existing ram and HDD unless you have another use for it. I'm still waiting till Tiger comes with the machine. I can hold out till June :-).

I ran across this too: Pictures of all Apple products in history.

John, January 26, 2005 10:39 PM:

It looks like Apple has quietly dropped the prices on most of the built to order add-on's for the mini. You can check it out at MacMinute.

John, January 28, 2005 04:48 PM:

J pointed us offline to a good Anandtech article on the Mac mini. One thing to note, 512M is required for any reasonable performance. Also 32M of video memory is not enough for a good experience as resolutions above 1280 x 960 max.

They also have a couple of blog posts regarding the Mac mini's support for Tiger, here, and here. The bottom line here is that the graphics chip in the mini will not support Core Image or Quartz Extreme 2D. So you won't get the cool GPU offloaded UI in Tiger. You should be able to have an experience similar to that of Panther however.

J, January 29, 2005 11:13 PM:

Interesting that Anand is into Macs now. I have to respect him for being a fan of all cool tech. Things don't sound too bad about Tiger. The OS isn't finished - I'm sure they have someone working on optimizations that will let it run fine on the Mini. That said - a rev b. mobo with slightly more powerful graphics and 64mb vram, and 512MB ram would be worth $100 more.

Hap, February 1, 2005 10:50 PM:

I agree with what your saying here about the memory but we need to keep in mind that this is the mini we are talking about here and I think it passes the "good enough" test for most of the things people will use it for. What are the Tech Specs for the Xbox or my Tivo? I don't know off hand but I can play movies listen to music etc so I think it's clear that the mini will as well do just fine as well.

It is expandable. I can do a lot with this machines ports (both wired and unwired. Can it run HD? I don't know but for me thats a ways off anyway so it's really not an issue for me nor is anything else really hi end and I suspect for most people as well.

As I said. If I where to get one I would put in my TV cabinet and let my kids go crazy with it while I managed it from my high end work station.

As for the Mini's shortcommings, these are the same complants I have heard about the current Imac. Not quite good enough (video and main) memory (too true). However with all the good press the Imac mini is gettting it may be a while before we see these things "fixed". I just looked on Apples web site and the shipping time is up to 3-4 weeks meanwhile the new PowerBooks that were just announced have a shipping time of 1-3 days. Anyone remember what the Imac Mini's shipping time was a few weeks ago when it was anounced? I would like to see the hardware updated every six months or when Tiger is shipped but I wouldn't count on it. Well see what they do with the Imac here in a few months. I think that should give us a good idea where the Mini is going.

Bottom line. the Mini is "good enough" for most of what I and my family do. I suspect the same holds true for most people and I wouldn't expect it to do much more. Could it be better
@#$%$# YEAH (excuse my language) but don't hold your breath and I wouldn't let that stop you from buying one now.

J, February 2, 2005 12:07 AM:

I just used a 400mhz G3 with 256 mb ram running 10.3. It was fine. Expose' ran, as did firebird, etc. So you may be right about the memory being OK for basic users. I definitely agree that they need to keep some reason for you to buy their premium machines, so this one is never going to be as those.

BTW, I hadn't used a mac in a while, and 10.3 is pretty nice. There was some key you could press that sort of slid all the windows out of the way, like show desktop, but slicker. That and expose' would make working on a smaller screen feasible. The one thing that really bugs me about macs now is that the menus aren't in the windows. I hate the dumb menubar always on top (I know, I know, it wastes space to have it in every window...). The ability to close windows and still have the app running is disconcerting. I don't want to start an argument here with mac fanboys, but I think I'm entitled to be critical because I used macs exclusively until recently.

Here's another thing I was thinking about - I heard of a friend's parent being completely confused by double click (not getting that it doesn't mean the same as clicking twice). For all the talk about how a 1 button mouse is simpler, how the heck did double click get invented? There used to be this whole tutorial on the mac when you installed the OS about how to double click and stuff. Why didn't the original mouse designers just use left and right buttons instead of double click? :-)

J, February 3, 2005 09:18 AM:

Mac Mini overclock - save a few bucks, but deal with surface mount soldering. http://www.lbodnar.dsl.pipex.com/macmini/

The Way Back Machine

Cool Tech

January 11, 2005 10:03 AM PST

Most of you are aware of my love / hate relationship with Netflix. I was an early adopter of this service and excluding the 6 month period where we were broken up and were 'seeing other people', my experience has been overwhelmingly positive. Lately I've been really amazed at the trend to release old TV shows on DVD.

Continue reading "The Way Back Machine"...

Comments (15)

Paul, January 11, 2005 02:40 PM:

LAND OF THE LOST!!! That's going in my queue right now!

Do you remember that show that was on Saturday mornings, after cartoons? It was set in a post-apocalypse desert and they drove around in a big white van (with spinning radar on the roof) and the back of the van opened up like a ramp and a small buggy/car came out the back? This wasn't a cartoon. The van had a really sharp "futuristic" nose section.

John, January 11, 2005 03:15 PM:

I was wondering about this show too a while back. I thought it was a Kroft Brothers show, but maybe not. I think it was called "Ark II". Had a talking chimp and cool jet packs. Here is a link:
http://www.70slivekidvid.com/ark.htm

This one is too obscure for Netflix now, but give it time.

John, January 11, 2005 03:23 PM:

Looking for some more lost memories? Here are some more I remember:
Bigfoot and Wildboy
Far Out Space Nuts
Isis
Shazam
Lost Saucer
Monster Squad
Space Academy
Wonderbug

It looks like yesterdayland.com is down, used to be fun. Try this site for more: http://www.70slivekidvid.com/

Paul, January 11, 2005 03:56 PM:

Ark II is it!! My quest, at long last, is over. Now I shall rest.

PS: Remember that show where they flew a garbage collecting spaceship?

John, January 11, 2005 05:57 PM:

Salvage One.

Paul, January 11, 2005 08:17 PM:

Your Retro-Foo is strong, young grasshopper.

Wheelson, January 13, 2005 11:17 PM:

No WAY! This is super awesome news. I rented the pilot Night Rider DVD about a month ago because when I was a kid I missed it and never got to see it. It lost quite a bit of coolness over the years though. Land of the Lost though...awesome.

Paul, January 14, 2005 11:00 PM:

After Night Rider, you should rent AirWolf.

J, January 15, 2005 01:29 PM:

Airwolf was ridiculous - it's a helicopter that can go mach-2 without getting the rotors ripped off! I'll take blue thunder over airhawk any day. Ha ha ha.

Paul, January 15, 2005 01:57 PM:

It's amazing just how many problems you can solve with big guns, a fast chopper and a cheesy theme song.

Wheelson, January 15, 2005 10:31 PM:

Oh the day the AirWolf theme song streams through my apartment will be a glorious one. Greatest American Hero? Yup.

As cool as this is, Netflix is ruining things for kids today. When I was a kid I was forced to watch reruns of "Leave it to Beaver", "The Brady Bunch" and stuff like that because those were shows being re-run. Right when it was time for shows like AirWolf to fill daytime TV slots, something happened. Maybe it was cable, but re-runs stopped being cool. So, where the Baby Boomers got their jollies showing reruns of their favorite shows to us, kids today may never know who Mr. T is.

Paul, January 15, 2005 11:47 PM:

But now, you can have "Theme Weekends": 48 episodes of The A-Team or MacGyver. Oh, the humanity.

Anyways, why can't I just download the stuff instead of waiting for the mail?

Scott, July 12, 2005 09:13 PM:

RE:The garbage collecting spaceship...looking for the name of the show as well...

Wasnt Salvage 1 the junkman had a dream one....based off of earth

The one I want is where the garbage scow is in space collecting trash....this one was always in space....

John, July 12, 2005 11:22 PM:

Oh 'that' show. Geeez I had to dust the cob webs off that corner of my mind. That ill-fated show was called 'Quark'. It aired in 1978 and lasted about 8 episodes. The had a half man half woman, a plant guy an android (of course) and a couple of clones. I don't think we will be seeing this on netflix anytime soon - although I hear that comedy central ran it once awhile back. Here are some links to jog your memory, but not much in the way of screen shots (pre-VCR).

Imbd
tv.com
tvparty
television city

Paul, July 13, 2005 12:03 AM:

Admit it: you've been waiting all these years for someone to ask you this stuff!

Free Online Technical Books

NocturnalCoder

January 10, 2005 02:46 PM PST

I just rediscovered TechBooksForFree. They have a pretty good selection of free online technical books including Eugene Blanchard's Introduction to Data Communications. As with many free resources, mileage may vary.
I'm always amazed by just how much web related information discover and then delete from memory.

Comments (2)

net.history

January 10, 2005 12:23 AM PST

Or, moments of extreme nerdity in Paul's life.

What was your first exposure to TEH INTARWEB ?

In the beginning...

Continue reading "net.history"...

Comments (5)

John, January 10, 2005 02:20 PM:

he he, you said "Timex-Sinclair 2000".

J, January 11, 2005 06:18 PM:

We actually had an AOL account in 1991 and it was actually really cool! I remember gopher and mosaic in college, but those weren't as cool as AOL back then. AOL was actually really visionary with program downloads, forums, graphics and I forget what else. They basically did like everyone else and got lazy on fat subscriber revenues.

I primarily worked on AppleII, GS, Lisa, Plus, SE, si and ci. Didn't mess with PC until work and windows 95. And now look at me - completely converted to AMD and XP.

The thing I think is interesting is the blog revolution vs. the homepage revolution. Everyone used to have a home page, and it was like when desktop publishing came out - all full of blink tags and animated gifs. Then people realize it took too much work to mess with HTML and even frontpage, so they gave up. Now you have basically frontpage online where you can pick some templates and do a web page - called a blog. It's a different mind-shift for sure, and I doubt blogs could have come before personal Web pages - even through they're much easier to to do.

Dean, January 22, 2005 07:17 AM:

Gosh. I started time-sharing on a VAX in, oh, something like 1981. Wrote programs in WATFIV. Then got entirely out of it for years, and got back in sometime in 1989. Did the BBS thang, then found a way onto the net back before anyone had heard of it, back when USENET had something like a staggering 1000 newsgroups.

I honed my typing skills on text-based MUDs (the original Rivers of Mud, and ROM II) some of which are still operating.

I remember the web in 94 or whenever, when there were something like two dozen sites available. "This could go somewhere", I thought. Within a few months, there were hundreds, then thousands, and then boom.

Ah, the good ol' days. Things are much better now.

Paul, January 28, 2005 05:29 PM:

Ha! MUDs! I used to play on Frontier MUD at the University of Manitoba back in the day:

> north
You are in a room with 4 doors.

> open door
I don't know what you are talking about.

> open west door
I don't know what you are talking about.

> open door 1
The door opens.
The kobold hits.
The kobold hits.
The kobold hits.
The kobold hits.
The kobold hits.
You have died.
You appear in a room with 4 doors.

> exit

Davie, February 4, 2005 05:25 AM:

Rivers of Mud! I remember that at UTK in 1992.
Thanks for the memory upgrade.

you are hungry.

> eat brain
You eat the rabbit's brain.

And yes, that is where I got my typing skills. HA!

HP Bluetooth Headphones

Reviews

January 9, 2005 01:00 AM PST

Lobot Yes as part of the new year I am fully embracing the wireless lifestyle. I’m just plain tired of wires. Since J brought it up, here is a mini-review of the HP Bluetooth headphones also known as “Lobot” phones.

Continue reading "HP Bluetooth Headphones"...

Comments (1)

John Lobot

Humour

January 8, 2005 06:55 PM PST

Lobot If John had his way, we'd all be walking around like Lobot, Lando Calrissian's right hand man. Bluetooth earphones with built in controls connected to a wireless PDA are just the first step. ;-)

Comments (2)

Secure Digital + USB2 Card

Cool Tech

January 6, 2005 07:06 PM PST

Lots of new announcements from CES this week, but this one from SanDisk is so simple and useful. I can't believe how small memory components are getting. You can use this SD card in your camera, and then just take it to any computer and plug it into the USB port to back up the data, or share pictures. This would come in so handy when traveling and visiting friends who want copies of photos, or offloading a full card in a net cafe and burning them to CD. I'm all for getting rid of those 7-in-1 flash card readers!
Here's a review with more pictures.

Comments (1)

SFF AMD64

Toys

January 2, 2005 03:02 PM PST

Last week we built a Small Form Factor AMD64 machine. AMD64 is really at not only the peak of performance, but also of price. Intel based machines have really been taking a beating this year. Intel tried to add the x64-64 extensions to their high-end P4s, but the results were super expensive and performance worse than AMD's standard solution. The AMD64 chips are also much cooler, making them a better solution for small form factor, silent PC and overclocking.

So much is written about 64-bit machines being able to address more ram. But for some reason, marketers haven't pushed the primary home user advantage - faster math operations. Operations on 64 bit integers bit integers happen natively, giving up to 4x performance over standard 32 bit architectures on operations such as multiplying two 64 bit ints to a 128 bit int. Intel's SSE2 extensions do allow 64 bit operations, but these must be hand coded in assembly. 64 bit compilers will automatically take advantage of the increased precision. Also, since the registers are all larger, the register space is effectively doubled, providing much faster access to common variables than the slower, more expensive cache.

The cool thing is, AMD64 is the best performing PC architecture, but we haven't seen its full potential. Until Windows XP x64 is released (scheduled mid-2005), we won't see the OS, or any applications compiled for the new processor. That means that we should see a significant boost in applications once the Microsoft compiler for x86-64 is available.

Here's a great overview of AMD64 performance. To view the charts (in the black squares), you must select the text - there's a bug in their HTML code. Tests were done on 32 and 64 bit linux on the same processor, showing the massive gains in 64 bit mode. Also for comparison, they completely trounce the "equivalent" P4 3.2ghz. Example:

CPU	RSA 1024 bit digital signatures per second
P4 3.2GHZ	147.2
AMD64 3200+ 32 bit mode	207.3
AMD64 3200+ 64 bit mode	913.8

Get ready for huge performance improvements to game engines and audio/video encoding when XP x64 is available.

Read on for the specs, photo and current pricing of this bad boy. Continue reading "SFF AMD64"...

Comments (1)

Shopping Spree

Cool Tech

January 2, 2005 04:07 AM PST

On Friday, I went for a walk around Union Square in San Francisco, which is 4 blocks from where I live, to get some fresh air and lunch despite the rain. I lived in Seattle for 3.5 years and never had an umbrella; it rains for 2 days in California and I buy the first umbrella I find. Anyways, I ended up buying the following things:

MechAssault 2: Giant Robots! Blowing Stuff Up! What More Do You Want???
Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence: Some incredibly beautiful animation and a great story
Hacker's Delight: For those math n3rd programmers that like low level H4ckz
A Random Walk Down Wall Street: What to do with all the Benjamins
One ticket to The Life Aquatic (with Steve Zissou): a brilliant, slow paced film that anyone growing up in the 70's and 80's can appreciate (bonus points for the David Bowie / Casio-Dad soundtrack). I never appreciated how beautiful Cate Blanchett is until now. From the director of The Royal Tenenbaums
An order of Chicken Tikka Masala from The Chaat Cafe: Awesome! Will be going back for more...

Comments (2)

Coding Style: Part, the first

Hacking

January 2, 2005 03:04 AM PST

Over the years, I've encountered a number of coding styles from different companies, books and open source projects. I find that I am really picky about coding consistency, and that I get annoyed with code that looks ugly.

Therefore, a brief summary of stuff that I find annoying:

Continue reading "Coding Style: Part, the first"...

Comments (1)

nullstream weblog - January 2005

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